On our last trip to Montana, I was shooting inside an old Victorian hotel with creaking wooden floors and walls painted pastel earth colours. In one room, the old range sat rusting beside a window. The place was full of photographic opportunities; outside the windows old log cabins sat in the snow. In fact, it [...]
Those of you who have followed me for a while know that I love winter. Whenever we get snow in Vancouver I rejoice and run out with my camera. I know what you think. Many of my friends around the world shake their head and message me: Come on, Olaf—you are in Canada and you [...]
It’s been a productive but visually quite unexpected year. This became clear after spending the last few days picking the top 10 images of 2019. As many of you know, I try to do this every year. The longer I do it, the more convinced I am that it brings tremendous insights to my photography [...]
As I look back at the last few years, I see almost every December we go on a road trip. This year is no different. It was 2015 when we last photographed the Canadian Rockies in winter and it turned out to be one of our favourite road trips of all time. This year, we [...]
I have always loved reading books. When I was a teenager, I would spend the entire summer in my room reading. It reached a point when my parents hid my books and told me to go outside and play. Yes, it was that bad! This passion for reading has become a passion for writing and [...]
I have to admit I‘ve never done this before. Do I have a great voice for podcasting? Of course not. A few months back I found the following comment on one of my YouTube videos: “Olaf, you have such a mafia voice.” Well, if the podcast doesn’t work, I can always take up a new [...]
The process of crafting great imagery is something I have been studying for years. One of the undertakings in this rivetting pursuit was to study hundreds of great images from many photographers, well known and less well known, from different backgrounds and with unique seeing profiles across most genres of photography. Today I would like [...]
You wake up in the morning and run up to the computer, excited and eager to share with the world your newfound passion for photography. There is so much to explore and learn. You already know it is all about seeing, light, composition, photographic projects. It is about finding your own visual voice. You have [...]
With persistence, talent and hard work you start producing satisfactory and sometimes even great images. The drill is well-known. You go out, shoot some images, edit and then share them with your friends on social forums or other mediums of your choice, then repeat! Most of us limit our photographic life to single images which [...]
Over the course of the last few years I have met many amazing photographers on my Visual Poet Experience Workshops. Interestingly, some of them realized very little of their hidden talent for seeing and crafting great imagery. As I have studied this phenomenon, I stayed in touch with some students, following their struggles and their [...]
